Women and Gender in Ancient Egypt

This exhibition uses Egyptian artifacts from
the collection of the Kelsey Museum and the Papyrology collection of the
University of Michigan Library to examine the roles and lives of women in
ancient Egyptian society, and how these fit into the larger patterns of
gender definitions and relations. Since ancient times, it has been recognized
that women occupied special positions within Egyptian society, but only
recently has the nature of women's experience and status in ancient Egypt
been the subject of systematic study.

The material presented in Women and Gender in Ancient Egypt spans
nearly four thousand years, from later prehistoric times through the Muslim
conquest of Egypt. Even in a culture that showed remarkable continuities
over long periods of time, there was obviously considerable change in the
roles and status of women, as well as in gender definitions and relations
over such a long chronological range.

Historical events and cultural imports are often the most obvious influences
on women's roles and gender relations, but factors such as class and status,
sexuality and ethnicity also influence understandings of gender. Part of
the source material from ancient Egypt reflects a major class bias: texts
and images most often come from elites in Egyptian society and reflect their
views. It is mainly the archaeological sources--remains of dwellings and
burials--that offer unfiltered evidence for non-elites. While texts and
images tend to be relatively explicit about gender, archaeological remains
require more work to distinguish biological sex from human remains, gender
in the artifactual record, gendered space. Patterns of sexual behavior and
construction of sexual identity are also closely tied to gender definitions
and roles. As is common in premodern agrarian societies, sexuality in ancient
Egypt was linked to fertility, although not exclusively. Surviving sexually
explicit imagery and texts from ancient Egypt can be of erotic, humorous,
satirical, or even religious intent as well. Moreover, many ethnic groups
influenced Egyptian life throughout the period covered by this exhibition
(c. 3100 BCE-700 CE). The most conspicuous were the Macedonian Greeks and
Romans who successively ruled Egypt after 332 BCE, but many other groups
from all over the Mediterranean world influenced Egyptian customs and society.
Certainly Greek and Roman traditions concerning gender--the more dependent
status of women in these cultures as well as the different approaches to
gender relations and definitions--had a major impact on Egyptian life during
the Graeco-Roman period.